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Dessie Reed Ford, interviewed by Bill Welch, December 2000

Dessie Reed was a young nurse just out of training from the nursing school in Greenville, S.C., in November 1941. She could feel the "winds of war" from a world that was already engaged in conflict.  She knew she would be needed and joined the American Red Cross.

Two months later, with the United States at war, she and five friends enlisted in the U.S. Army.

At the time Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, the Army Nurse Corps had about 1,000 nurses on duty or in training. Reed would become one of more than 56,000 in the Corps by the time World War II ended, and one of 32,000 nurses who went overseas. When she returned in 1945, her last name would be Ford.

Joining the Army was not a new idea for the freshly graduated nurse.  From the time she saw her father, a veteran of World War I, being treated at a Veterans Administration hospital in Columbia, S.C., she knew she wanted to be a nurse

"I told him there, this is what I want to do."   The fact her mother was a nurse, too, helped  with the career decision.

Her father was also a member of the local American Legion, while she was a member of the junior auxiliary.  Being around veterans made joining the Army seem like a natural step. 

Still, telling her parents what she had done took some doing.  While off enlisting, her mother and father went to visit her, but she wasn't there.  Her mother later called to find out where she had been. Dessie couldn't just come out and say she had enlisted.  "The only way that I could figure to tell her was to sing 'You're in the Army Now.'  I had gone over and joined the Army."

After undergoing training at Fort Bragg, N.C., 2nd Lt. Reed was assigned to a newly formed unit in September 1942 – the 55^th Station Hospital. A station hospital would be set up well behind the lines, providing care to GIs who had already received basic treatment at aid stations or mobile hospitals closer to the front lines.

Her tour of duty would take her to North Africa and Italy. She would help care for soldiers recuperating from battle wounds, accidents and disease.  In wartime, disease, accidents and other noncombat troubles ranging from food poisoning to bad liquor, caused as much business for the hospitals as combat.

She might be a nurse, but this was still the Army.  "We had to learn to march, how to dig a slit trench, how to pitch a tent." They learned the basics of Army life – what they would be able to take overseas, how to pack, what they could write or not write in letters back home or in talking with others.

The nurses were from all over the United States. They would form close friendships.  Though it's been nearly 60 years, she can still remember many of their names.

The nurses trained at Fort Bragg until April 20, 1943.  From there they went to Camp Kilmer in New York.

On April 27, the Army nurses gave a new look to the Easter parade in New York City when they marched in it.  "That night they told us to get our gear together." Two days later they boarded a ship, the Borinquen, bound for North Africa.  Sharing the ship – but still kept separate – was a paratroop regiment.

When Reed and the rest got their orders,  "It was excitement, anticipation. This is what we had been training for."

The Borinquen was one of many ships in a transatlantic convoy on its way to provide supplies, replacements and added support for the American forces in North Africa, which had been invaded in November.  By this time, North Africa was close to being cleared of German and Italian forces. Most combat ended in May. In July, the Allies would invade Sicily, followed by Italy in September. 

Aboard the ship, six women shared a stateroom, sleeping in hammocks.  How did they spend their time? "We read, wrote letters, had drills."  

They arrived at Oran, Algeria, May 11, 1943.  Their staging area would be Goat Hill at Fleurs, Algeria, where they stayed until June 14.  For five days, they rode an old French train eastward.  Five nurses jammed into a small passenger compartment. Their barracks bags filled the center of the compartment.  To sleep, they had to arrange their blankets on top of the barracks bags and seats, and stretch out.

"We were jammed in so tight that if one person had to roll, over, they had to call it out so that all rolled at the same time," she said. They had one canteen of water a day and one stop for meals per day.

The destination was Tunisia and a walled city called Kairouan, which they did not enter.

They set up their headquarters in an old hotel that the Germans had used as a headquarters, the same building that Erie's Col. Phil Cochran had dropped a single bomb onto from his P-40 fighter-bomber months before.

Much of their work was converting the building into a hospital. The first patients were admitted June 24.  They came with a variety of problems.  Some had what the staff called "pepitassi fever," a disease somewhat like malaria.  Some were injured after walking or riding over one of the many land mines left behind from the recent fighting. 

In November, they left for Taranto, at the boot of Italy.  The unit's nurses were on a hospital ship and the men went on another ship.  Shortly after arriving, a few of the nurses were detached from the 55^th Station Hospital and sent to Bari, a harbor town on the east side of the Italian peninsula. From there they would go to the major air base at Foggia.

On Dec. 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe attacked the Allied ships crowded into the relatively small Bari harbor. Seventeen were sunk, including one laden with ammunition and mustard gas. Hundreds of merchant sailors, servicemen and civilians in the town were killed in the attack and subsequent explosions. 

"Our hospital ship was one of the ones sunk. We lost all our hospital equipment. The nurses lost all our clothes," Ford said. "Our men were on a different ship, so they weren't killed."

The nurses had planned to have dinner aboard one of the ships in the harbor, but a change in guards at the docks prevented them from getting aboard. Instead, they stayed in town, where they ate at a casina and then would go to the opera.

"We were in the casina when the bombs started dropping, and the opera house we were going to got a direct hit. Another nurse, Marge Howard, and I, missed it all the way around."

The nurses had their barracks bags, which they carried with them at all times, but nothing else. Their extra clothes were destroyed. Reed wrote to her mother, asking for new clothes, saying she had lost hers.  She didn't explain what caused them to get lost.  That would never have gotten past the military censors.

"She wrote back, yes she would, but that I was always careless with things,"  Dessie said with her big smile flashing.

For the next few weeks, she worked with a British Army ambulance battalion until her the station hospital's new equipment arrived.  Patients who were on their way to other station hospitals were brought to this way station.  Their litters would be set on sawhorses and the staff, including Reed, would change their dressings. The injured soldiers would then be taken on their way away from the action.

Fifteen miles from Foggia, another coastal city on Italy's east side, they set up their hospital.  The hospital mainly served the Fifteenth Army Air Force, which worked primarily from the Foggia air base, as well as the U.S. Army service units there, plus the British army, which bore the brunt of the combat on the eastern half of the Italian peninsula.

At Christmas, four of the nurses went to the Isle of Capri for some R&R.  Reed qualified for it because she had endured the Bari air raid.

One of the other units in the Foggia area was the 814^th Engineers Battalion, which organized a dance on New Year's Eve. At that dance, a lieutenant named Robert Ford from the 814^th asked Reed to dance.  "I told him to get lost."

Back when she was on Goat Hill in Africa, officers would come calling to the nurses of the 55^th Station Hospital. As the youngest in the hospital, at age 22, she was teased by the visiting officers who wanted her to meet the youngest man in their outfit. He wasn't around at the time. That young man was Ford.

Two days later, her roommate had a date, but the nurses could only go on dates in pairs.  Reed would have to get a date so her friend could keep her date.  Reed wasn't enthusiastic about it.

"When I walked out, it was him."  The romance that led to a wartime marriage had begun.

In the fall of 1943, Reed applied for a transfer that would get her to one of the units that would take part in the invasion of France that everyone knew would have to come sometime in 1944. Instead of transferring her to England where those units were stationed in preparation for the invasion, the Army sent Reed to the 61st Station Hospital at Foggia.  She was a first lieutenant now and the 61st needed a nurse with that rank

Not long after, her unit was moved north to Grosetta. Ford's unit was shipped to Naples.  Later in the year, the 814^th was transferrred back to Foggia to cotinue engineering work around that area.  Reed was still in the area with her hospital unit.

While this might sound like a wartime romance story, it was more than that, Ford said.

"This was not all fun and games. We would get (patients from) jeeps that ran over land mines. We would get the men who were injured on bombing missions."  These were men who suffered terrible wounds and needed good medical care. 

"When you saw a plane coming in dropping flares, we knew they would have wounded on board.  We would be on trauma call. We would have to stay overnight in the hospital. If anything happened we would be called down."

One night on trauma call, she went to an incoming ambulance to help with a patient.  Instead, the attendants handed her a bloody sheet.  In it was a body part.  She still shows concern and distress at the memory. 

Learning to deal with moments like that came partly from training, she said.  They steadily received that training from the time they joined the Army, and still received it in Foggia.

"Men we knew would go out on air missions and they didn't come back."

She saw one bomber crash and explode after returning from a mission.

A man she had dated in Africa was killed when his plane was shot down. A friend in her unit was killed when she returned from leave. The plane bringing her back crashed.

Wartime brought plenty of hardships. In Africa they met a range of troubles: Scorpion bites; the scorpions crawling into shoes left out over night; sand storms; the incredible heat during the day followed by nights that were very cold.

"Sometimes you might hear me talk and think it was a romantic interlude for me. But it wasn't that at all.  It was hard work. And sometimes you didn't have enough to eat. We had to barter with the Arabs to get a cow – I hope it was a cow. And we had to eat C-rations.

Her unit was not the MASH-like units that became familiar to television viewers.  It was back farther from the front. Still, it was no picnic.

"Although I wasn't on the front lines, like 'Saving Private Ryan,' we had our share of it."

She could identify in with one scene from Private Ryan in particular. A mortally wounded soldier gets morphine from his buddies. In terrible pain, he calls for his mother.

"I had the same experience with a young soldier.

"I'm speaking for all the nurses. You were a wife, a mother, and you were a sweetheart. That's the way they saw you."

"You could be the mother figure, the sweetheart or the wife."

   The Army had psychiatric units in Italy. Some of the psychiatrists talked with the nurses about what they were going through, she said.  Chaplains also did their part in counseling the nurses.

"We comforted each other. You had to get along. You needed each other."

Because Bob Ford was a special service officer, she had the chance to see the entertainment. That had its perks. She had a chance to meet and get acquainted with Humphrey Bogart when he toured the region with the USO.  She and Bob had dinner with boxer Joe Louis, too, when Louis gave an exhibition boxing match.

"These were the things you had in between to keep you from going stark, raving crazy on the other side of the spectrum."

And there was leave time.  She saw Rome and Pompeii, the city buried by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius 2,000 years ago.  Men and women could not visit the uncovered city because of the sexually explicit mosaics and other art works there. 

It was standard for the women to have men escort them in many circumstances.  Even visiting the latrine in North Africa required an escort.  Once, Reed and another nurse were using the latrine at night when they heard a ripping sound.  An Arab had cut the tent with his knife and ran off with it, "leaving us under the stars." From then on, a guard stood outside the tent.

Even when visiting patients, ward men who go along as the nurses cared for their patients.  "You had big wards with one man after another, laid out head to foot.  In the medical wards, the ward man would tell you a patient needed something or other and he would take you back."  In the surgical wards, it was different because the patients were in worse shape.

Still, there is some romance to this story. There's the matter of Dessie Reed meeting the man she would marry, accepting his proposal and then actually marrying him in Italy.

Bob Ford proposed to her in front of a ward full of men.  She still smiles when she tells it.  "He walked onto the floor that night, and I said, 'What're you doing here?'  And he said, 'Would you marry me.'"

They had to wait three months to get permission to marry.  The FBI had to check their backgrounds first.  "We got our orders that we could get married on or after the 12th of March 1945."  Wasting no time, they were married on the 12th in the ballroom of the governor's palace in Foggia.  They honeymooned at the Isle of Capri.

After the war in Europe was over, the two left Italy the same day, but on different ships. Mrs. Ford got across three days sooner that Mr. Ford.

She was the only one of the 30 nurses from the original 55th to get married overseas.  Ford pointed out that none of them had to go back to the U.S. because of pregnancy.

After visiting her family, she came to Erie in December 1945 to be with her husband.  Bob Ford first worked for the Erie Dispatch Herald and then became an Erie firefighter. For the first 12 years, in Erie, Dessie stayed at home to raise their daughter, Nancy, and son, Michael.  Then she worked at Hamot Hospital for nearly 25 years.

In the years after the war, both Fords were active members of Post 470 Veterans of Foreign Wars.  Dessie became the first woman veteran to become a full member, mainly by insisting that she was a veteran in her own right and not just an auxiliary member like the wives of the rest of the membership.

Following Bob Ford's retirement, she was made a life member of the post.  He was disabled by a series of strokes not long after retirement.  Dessie took him regularly to the post for years, until he passed away.

 In recent years, she has been serving in various jobs and functions.  Currently, she is the junior vice commander of Post 470 and the senior vice president of its auxiliary.  She also served on Erie's World War II Memorial Committee.

Looking back on it all, she said, "It's been a great life."